


You Knew That When You Married Me

by inlovewithnight



Category: Fantastic Four (Movieverse)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-05-02
Updated: 2006-05-02
Packaged: 2017-10-15 13:18:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/161177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Fantastic Four</i> meets <i>Mr. and Mrs. Smith</i> in a theater of the absurd.  Special guest appearance by another Marvel Comics character, but this is entirely movieverse; I have no comics knowledge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Knew That When You Married Me

Reed was a morning person. He loved to get up bright and early, shower, eat breakfast, and be in the lab before the other occupants of the building were even stirring. Why waste a perfectly good part of the day sleeping? Their loss. He had his coffee and a clear head and calculations waiting for him on the whiteboard. Not just any calculation, but a particularly tricky equation that he'd been working at for nearly a week, but this morning, _this_ morning, this particular cup of coffee, he thought he had the solution...

He set the cup on the desk, grabbed a marker, and stepped up to the board, only to blink and freeze.

The equation was gone.

In its place was a single sentence in Sue's neat, upright handwriting: _Honey, don't forget (again) to pick up the dry-cleaning._

He stumbled back to his desk chair and sat down hard, staring at the note and the blank white surface surrounding it.  
***  
Sue smiled to herself as she slipped on her robe and walked down to the kitchen. While there were no actual howls of anguish coming from the lab, she could imagine them perfectly clearly. She was a scientist herself, after all, she _knew_ the pain of losing a week's worth of mental effort. But hopefully this would be sufficient to teach Reed that using the last of the towels and not replacing them was just rude. _He_ might be able to just stretch himself down to the closet to snag another, but _other_ people had a bit more difficulty, and he could try being a bit more considerate for a change...

Well. Losing his precious equation would help him remember. She smiled to herself and reached into the refrigerator for the orange juice.

The carton felt suspiciously light. She felt her jaw clenching as she shook it gently and the silence confirmed: put away empty. She dropped it to the counter.

"I'm going to have to kill him," she announced.

Unbeknownst to Sue, at the very moment she declared her intention to murder her spouse, Reed was coming to the exact same conclusion.  
***  
"Aw, dude, is the honeymoon over?"

Reed ignored Johnny, reaching over and turning the machine up to level 5. Johnny had proven to be an excellent experimental test subject, due to his almost-complete lack of a self-preservation instinct.

"She's getting on your nerves." Ben shrugged and shifted his weight on the specially reinforced stool they'd had built for him. "That's normal, Reed. That's life."

"Have you never _seen_ married people before?" Johnny asked from the test area. Reed pushed the switch up to level 6.

"Doesn't mean anything's really wrong." Ben tilted his head and studied Reed carefully. "Maybe just an off day or two."

"Right." Reed nodded slowly, glancing at the data readout and jotting down a few notes. "I'm sure you're right."

Johnny's voice carried across the room again. "If it's sexual problems, it is absolutely essential that I not know about it!"

Reed ground his teeth and hit the switch up to level 7.

Ben reached over and patted his shoulder gently, which was still roughly equivalent to having a sack of flour dropped on it from a great height. "Don't worry about it, Reed. Don't overthink it. I know that's your hobby, but just...don't."

Reed frowned at his readout. "But isn't it true that sometimes a man just has to take a stand on things?"

"A man, yes," Johnny called. "But we're talking about _you_ , Reed."

Reed skipped levels 8 and 9 and went directly to 10.  
***  
"He's making you crazy." Alicia smiled and took a sip of her coffee, shrugging gracefully. "He's a man, Sue. That's what men _do_."

"I just don't understand how a certified genius can use 'I'm sorry, I didn't think' as an excuse so often." She stared at her own coffee. "Apparently he _never_ thinks. Except I know that's what he does in the lab all day, so why can't he bring just a little of it home with him?"

"Well, talk to him, Sue. It's not rocket science." Alicia laughed softly. "Well, I guess you two _are_ rocket scientists, so maybe I shouldn't say that."

Sue frowned. "No--I'm a geneticist and he does physics, Alicia."

"Not the point." She shook her head. "You've got to communicate. Thank him when he does something right, and let him know when he steps wrong. Carrot and stick."

Sue smiled wryly. "I can have a stick?"

"Hey, if you two are into that kind of thing..."

Sue was still smiling when she went up to the counter to get some muffins to go with the coffee. She was still smiling right up until she opened her wallet to pay for them.

The stack of bills had been replaced with a note in Reed's cramped, precise handwriting. _Sue, can you run to the cash machine? Thanks. Won't be back for dinner._

She felt her jaw clenching tight as she reached for her credit card instead. Forget communication. Reed Richards was a dead man.  
***  
Despite being an accomplished scientist with many years of experience in his field, Reed still got a certain childish thrill out of deliveries that involved release forms and waivers and warning stickers in a variety of languages.

The delivery man studied the set of plastic crates while Reed flipped through the six separate forms requiring his signature. "So...what's a guy like you need with 'Caution! Plant life!' that is also 'Caution! Toxic' and 'Caution! Potential biohazard'?"

Reed smiled and handed the clipboard back. "Those are mostly just for legal reasons."

"So...not toxic, then?"

"Oh, they're absolutely deadly." Reed began opening the latches on the first crate. "Recently discovered in the Amazon. They have a poison sixty times stronger than oleander."

"Jesus." Clutching the clipboard to his chest, he started backing toward the door. "Then why did you say it was just for legal reasons?"

"Oh, the 'biohazard' part." Reed snorted and shook his head. "That's just _silly_."  
***  
"Don't look so surprised to see me." Sue tossed her purse onto the table and slid into the chair across from him. "I told you I was meeting you for lunch."

"Of course." He put on his best smile and reached across the table to touch her hand. "You just look very pretty today."

She blinked. "Thank you. What happened?"

"Nothing happened!" He pulled his hand back and frowned at her. "Can't I compliment my wife?"

"Flowers this morning, compliments now..." She opened her menu and stared at it. "Call me paranoid, but that sort of makes a girl think something's up, Reed."

"Oh, so you got the flowers?" His voice rose a little higher than he would've liked as he said that. He cleared his throat and studied his own menu as intently as if the key to perpetual motion was listed somewhere between the entrees and desserts.

"I did. Yes. They were very pretty."

"You didn't like them?"

She sighed and lowered the menu to glare at him. "They were _orchids_ , Reed."

"Yes..."

"You know I'm allergic. Or at least I would think you know by now." She flicked the menu back up to hide her face. "I threw them in the trash before I had to spend the next three days mainlining Claritin."

Reed winced slightly. He'd have to keep an eye on the news for a sudden outburst of plant and animal death around the upstate landfills.  
***  
Sue could feel the blood throbbing in her temples as they left the restaurant and walked up the street back toward the Baxter Building. Reed was always a space cadet, that was just a given, but today he was worse than usual. She'd had to repeat everything three times over lunch, and she was still fairly certain that if she asked him to repeat _any_ of it back now, he'd just stare at her like a confused puppy. Actually, if she asked him what she'd had to eat, or what _he'd_ had to eat for that matter, he'd probably look at her the same way.

He was just off in his own little world. Like he _always_ was. And she was so damn tired of him not _seeing_ her.

She thought she'd explained that to him before.

"Sue," he said sharply. She glanced up, startled, to find him frowning at her. "Could you please control that?"

She looked down and saw that her hands had faded out, and her legs below her skirt.

"I thought by now you'd have a grip on it when we're just walking down the street."

So damn superior, condescending, _full_ of himself...

It was entirely on impulse. She saw the truck coming down the street, deliberately turned her next step sideways, and threw her shoulder into his with all of her weight and a little extra burst of force-field. Well. A _little_ extra burst in the sense that it didn't send him all the way across the street, just off the sidewalk and firmly into traffic.

She'd forgotten that _his_ power didn't require any kind of effort at all. Of course not, then he might have a little bit of goddamn understanding. No, _he_ got a mutation that bounced him off the bumper of the truck and landed him flat on his ass in the gutter. Which was pretty funny, but not exactly what she'd been hoping for.

"Sue!" He jumped to his feet, frantically brushing at his suit and staring at her in open-mouthed shock. "What the hell was that for?"

"I tripped," she said as sweetly as she could, adjusting her purse on her shoulder and giving a little shrug. "Oops."  
***  
The suit was ruined.

Reed wasn't sure why that bothered him so much. It was just an item of clothing. Completely irrelevant in the grander scheme of things.

If he was going to be perfectly honest (which a scientist always should, of course), it was the symbolism of the thing. He had always considered his English and literature classes to be a complete waste of time, and concealed that fact badly, but he _had_ learned the material, by virtue of the simple fact that he couldn't have a book in front of him and not read and absorb every word. So he knew about symbolism in all its shades, metaphor and simile and metonymy and synechdoche and all that. And while he was not in the mood at the present to figure out which form of symbolism this was, he knew that Sue ruining his suit was very, very symbolic.

It was like the way she kept coming into the lab and spoiling his experiments. Spoiling them or worse, _fixing_ them. Fixing things he hadn't even noticed were wrong. She'd lean over his shoulder and point at his notes and catch an unmonitored variable, or a single error in an equation set that rendered the whole thing useless. She'd find his mistakes and then kiss him on the cheek and skip out of the lab again ( _Inaccurate_ , the detached and unemotional part of his mind reprimanded him, _Sue does not_ skip _in the lab_ ) as if she hadn't just essentially called him an idiot.

He left the suit crumpled on the bedroom floor and pulled on a t-shirt and jeans before going to the bathroom to wash his hands. Falling in a New York City gutter, he was lucky he still had _skin_ on them.

He frowned at himself in the mirror while he washed. Clearly, he was going to have to be more direct if he wanted to eliminate her. And eliminating her was becoming more essential: not only was she an actual and emotional impediment to his work, she was also apparently getting very clumsy, which was an unacceptable trait in a superhero.

His gaze wandered across the countertop as he turned the water off. Makeup and hair products and...Sue's blow dryer. He picked it up and studied it for a moment.

 _She spends half an hour in here every morning with this aimed directly at her brain._

Holding it above his head to keep the cord from dragging on the floor, he ran down the hall toward the lab.  
***  
Sue had called in a lot of favors to arrange this meeting. Which did not mean that she actually wanted to be here.

Under the patchwork of scars, she could tell that the man sitting across from her had once been extremely handsome. If her information was accurate, disfigurement hadn't driven Billy Russo to his life of crime, though; it had actually diverted it, from general Mafia mayhem to a specific fixation on The Punisher.

Since she was pretty sure she'd eventually won the heated debate with Reed over whether or not The Punisher counted as a superhero ("He _does_ fight crime, Susan!" "He's a vigilante, Reed!" "So are we, technically!" "Yes, but we're _better_ at it than he is!"), that didn't bother her as much as it possibly should.

The fact that Russo hadn't had any luck taking out the object of his obsession after this many years didn't bother her much, either. Reed was considerably less competent than The Punisher, when it came to taking care of himself.

"So, Jigsaw," she said, smiling brightly and using his alias; that was only polite, after all. "What do you say?"

"Eliminating Mr. Fantastic?" He shrugged and slumped lower in his chair. "What's he ever done to me?"

"Well, nothing," Sue had to admit. "But I can get you ten thousand dollars cash, and that'll pay for a lot of Punisher-tracking."

His eyebrows lifted a bare fraction, but in villain-parlance, that spoke volumes. Sue's smile grew even wider.

All that control over corporate accounts she'd had at Von Doom Industries did come in handy sometimes.  
***  
"So, sweetie," Sue said, barely able to keep the edge out of her voice. "How was your day?"

"Hmm?" Reed looked up from the newspaper and blinked at her for a moment. "Oh. Uneventful."

She watched him look back down and counted to ten, to make sure he was fully immersed in the article again, before she spoke again. "Nothing happened at all?"

He sighed and tossed the paper down, glaring at her across the room. "Nothing worth mentioning."

"Oh." She made a mental note to stop the wire transfer of funds. Couldn't you count on idiot hirelings for _anything_ anymore?

"I mean..." He had picked up the paper again and was searching for his place. "Some guy tried to break into the lab, but Ben just tossed him out a window and that was the end of it."

Maybe she'd let half the money go through.

He looked up at her again. "Have you changed something about your hair?"

"No."

"It looks...lighter."

She shrugged. "I noticed that too, but I haven't been doing anything different. Just blow-drying it."

She thought his eyes got a little wider before he looked back down at the news, but shrugged it off. Not important. She needed a new plan.  
***  
Clearly, he was trying much too hard and making things far more complicated than they needed to be.

People had been killing each other off for _centuries_. There were tried and true methods available. He was being inefficient by trying to reinvent the wheel, as it were.

He stood in the kitchen and frowned intently at the box in his hand. There was no need to be intimidated; a trained monkey could follow the instructions on a box of muffin mix. He simply had to make a slight adjustment for his personal secret ingredient.

He mixed by hand because the power mixer was utterly and completely inexplicable in a way that particle accelerators had the decency not to be. He poured the result into little paper cups carefully settled in a muffin tin. He realized he had forgotten to pre-heat the oven and sat at the kitchen table for ten minutes hoping that it didn't hurt anything if the surface of the batter dried out a bit.

By the time he heard Sue turn on the water for her shower, the muffins were neatly lined up on a cooling rack, with a note next to them-- _Enjoy, sweetie!_ \--and he was headed for the lab.  
***  
Sue looked around the kitchen and was forced to admit that, while annoyed, she was not surprised at all.

The muffins on the counter had been a pleasant surprise for exactly as long as it took her to notice the stack of dirty dishes placed neatly in the sink but not otherwise dealt with, the eggshells on the floor _beside_ the trash can, and the coffee pot sitting on the table instead of the coffee maker, and thus stone-cold.

She counted to ten in English, Russian, and French before giving it up as a lost cause. She poured the cold coffee down the sink and set up another pot to brew. Glaring at the muffins, she decided she wasn't hungry.

After pouring herself a mug, she glanced at the clock. If she knew her darling husband, he would be up here for his second cup of coffee in exactly eight and a half minutes. She pulled a small bottle from her pocket and tapped a few drops into the pot.

People had been killing each other off for centuries. There were tried and true methods available, and she should've gone with the simplest from the start.

A knock at the door made her jump. She twisted the cap on the bottle and stuffed it back on her pocket as she hurried over to answer.

"Morning, Mrs. Richards," Willy Lumpkin said, smiling cheerfully at her and holding out a stack of mail.

"Good morning." She smiled back and glanced through the envelopes. "How are you today?"

She didn't hear his reply, because an envelope marked "second notice" caught her eye. Second notice meant that there had been a first notice, picked out of the mail by Someone Else and not shared with her, despite the fact that she was the one in charge of the bills now.

If she kept clenching her jaw this much, she was going to ruin her teeth.

"Why don't you help yourself to those muffins, Willy?" she asked abruptly, stepping away from the door. "I'll be right back, I have to go talk to Reed."  
***  
"I am not _hiding_ things from you!" Reed gestured in frustration as he stalked toward the kitchen, Sue right on his heels and not giving an inch, just as she _never_ did. "Maybe it got lost in the mail!"

"I doubt that, Reed, I doubt that very much. Why can't you just pay attention, why can't you _think_ \--" He stopped so abruptly, she crashed into him. "And why can't you watch where you're going?"

"Susan?"

"What?" She stepped around him and also came to a sharp stop. "Oh."

"There's a dead mailman in our kitchen."

Sue nodded slowly, her eyes wide.  
***  
Reed thought it was fairly rude of the police officers to not do a better job of concealing their amusement at a group of superheroes who couldn't keep a murder from happening in their own building. He was going to write a sternly-worded letter to the commissioner, just as soon as he stopped feeling like he was going to throw up.

 _I killed the mailman._

Sue was sitting next to him on the couch, pale and red-eyed, and he found himself reaching over and gently squeezing her hand. It had to be a great shock to find the mailman dead in your kitchen even if you _weren't_ the one who'd killed him.

"Well," the detective said, closing his notebook and tucking his pen back in his pocket, "from what you say, there was at least a half an hour that the kitchen was completely unattended. We'll dust for prints. You should think about security cameras."

"We should've reported that guy the other day, Reed," Ben said from the corner, looking as mournful as possible considering the limitations of his facial mobility. Reed shook his head frantically, trying to wave him off, since they'd never actually reported pitching anyone through the window and that was probably a legal faux pas.

"What guy?" The detective frowned and looked from Reed to Ben and then quickly back to Reed.

"No guy. Thank you, detective." Reed stood and offered his hand, desperately hoping the man would decide to leave. "It's just so tragic. Poor Willy."

"Yeah." The detective shook his hand gingerly and headed for the door. "We'll be in touch."  
***  
Of all of the possible aftermaths to the situation, Sue had expected this one the very least.

The police thinking they were an entirely incompetent bunch of superheroes? She could have _told_ them that. Reed freaking out? She'd anticipated that, and weirdly failed to receive it. He just seemed stunned, not panicked.

Johnny and Ben turning into a pair of overprotective babysitters, though...she had _not_ expected that at all.

"Somebody broke into your home," Johnny said, wild-eyed and waving his hands in the air. "Where you _live_ , Sue!"

"That's what a home is, yes," Reed murmured, nodding.

"Somebody tried to poison you! Both of you!"

"It's terrible," Sue said, resting her head on her husband's shoulder, trying to hide her eyes. "Just terrible." _I can't believe I killed him. Poor Willy!_

Reed patted her back gently.

"You two are going to have to go on lockdown," Johnny rambled on, running one hand back over his hair. "We'll put you in protective custody for a while. Ben and I will solve this. We'll find whoever tried to kill my sister and...Reed, and we'll kick their asses all the way to Omaha."

"Johnny, I'm sure that's not necessary--" Reed began, but cut off as Ben entered the room.

"The police called," he said. "They got the lab results. It was the muffins _and_ the coffee."

"The _coffee_?" Reed blurted, just as Sue sat bolt upright and squawked "The _muffins_?"

They turned slowly and stared at each other for a long moment.

"Maybe you're right, Johnny," Sue finally said. "Maybe Reed and I need a little time alone."  
***  
The door had barely closed behind Ben and Johnny when Sue threw a book at Reed's head.

"You were trying to _kill_ me?" she shouted.

"Well, apparently it was mutual!" he shouted back, then ducked as a second book followed the first.

"I should've known better than to think you would actually do something nice for me! Muffins, that should've been a dead giveaway...oh! The _flowers_! You were trying to send me into anaphylactic shock, weren't you?"

"No," he said through clenched teeth, hovering close enough to the doorframe to dodge any further missiles. "They were just poison, that's all."

"Oh, you bastard."

"Well, what about you? You didn't trip in the street that day, you _pushed_ me! Admit it!"

"I do admit it!" she yelled, reaching for another book. "And that guy who broke into your lab? I _hired_ him, but apparently you can't find good help these days!"

His jaw dropped. "You hired someone to kill me? I worked my ass off coming up with clever ways to shuffle you off this mortal coil, and you _hired somebody_? I'm not even worth your best effort, Susan?"

She drew her hand back to throw the book, then stopped. "Wait. You're offended that I didn't _try harder_?"

He opened and closed his mouth a few times, attempting to formulate a response to that. "Well...yes. I suppose I am."

She stared at him for a minute. "I wanted to make sure it was done right. You know. Minimal suffering. The pushing you into the street thing was just an impulse, but I realized afterward that it would've been really messy."

He found himself oddly touched by that. "When I rigged your blow-dryer to irradiate your brain, I was hoping for minimal suffering as well. Clearly, it didn't work at all, but the idea was never to hurt you."

"It's really improved my hair." She smiled suddenly, setting the book back on the table. "Maybe we could market that."

"It could be your mutation protecting you, it might not have the same effect on normal--" He stopped, realizing that her smile was growing wider, and decidedly wicked. "What?"

"You put an awful lot of work into trying to kill me." She tipped her head to the side, her hair falling down over her face in a way that he had always found particularly alluring. "Killing me really _mattered_ to you."

"It did," he said fervently, taking a cautious step toward her. "It truly did."

"You really...stretched the limits of that brain of yours, didn't you?" She held her hand out toward him, and he took it, drawing it up and kissing the back of it gently. "I've always found smart guys devastatingly attractive."

"I've always had a bit of a thing for ruthless women."

"Oh, baby." She smiled and tugged him back toward the couch. "You ain't seen nothing yet."  



End file.
